Judge and Victim: The Two Images of Christ

There are two basic
images of Christ in the Church, each marking one of the two poles which hold
the very limits of the cosmos. The first
image is that of the Pantocrator and its derivatives, essentially Christ shown
in the guise of a glorious emperor, both the origin and the final judge of the
world. The other basic image is that of
Christ on the cross and its derivatives, where he is shown humiliated, beaten
and crucified outside the great city as a vicious criminal despite his
innocence.

The Pantocrator is
an image of authority and power, with Christ appearing as the origin and
culmination of all order. In the dome, the glorious Christ is the pinnacle of a
cosmic hierarchy of angels and saints which gives structure and shape to the
created. It is an image that inspires
awe, pride and discipline. The Pantocrator,
the great judge with the double edged sword coming from his mouth not
only has the power to include, but also the power to exclude and marginalize.
This is what order always does. Order, in fact any category, any “logos” or
identity must both include and exclude.

Yet standing at the
other end of the cosmic expanse is the cross, the bridegroom, the burial and
other images of Christ’s Passion in which Christ embodies the excluded and
marginal space where order breaks down into death — where order, where law, can
exclude and kill the innocent. It is an image that inspires compassion, pity
and mercy.

As people, we all
fall somewhere between these two poles in our approach to faith and our
perception of Christ. Being more on one
side or the other has its positive aspects, it can make us stronger or more
compassionate, but each side can also hide our vices. In secretly favoring
Christ as King, we may feel disgust for those aspects of the world that do not
fit, the marginal, the wayward and the peripheral and it may push us to
exclusively seeing the danger posed by those who stray from order.

In the opposite
manner, by favoring Christ as crucified, in seeing Christ as the innocent
victim, we may come to resent authority, oppose order while feeling entitled as
we face what appears to us as tyrannical power. This may go to the point of
accepting sin, of rejoicing in rebellion and disorder.

Considering this,
St. Maximos links these extremes to our passions. The first is a passion from
the Right, based in the smug attachment to our own self professed capacity for
discipline and order. The other a passion of the Left, the fall into the chaos
of our individual whims and desires:

The passions of the
flesh may be described as belonging to the left hand, self-conceit as belonging
to the right hand.”

It is important,
especially in these dark times, to always keep these two images of Christ in
view, like a balance with two arms, preventing one from tipping the other and
checking the excesses of each. Keeping
both images in mind can also act for us as a bulwark against adversity, for
most critiques of Christianity are either of one or the other of these
extremes. If the Nietzschian critique is
that Christianity is a cesspool of resentment, victimhood and slave mentality,
the feminist and post-modern critique has been that Christianity is the bastion
of Patriarchy and oppression of the weak. But to view Christ, the one who is
“all in all” is to view that he is both the master and the slave, both the
judge and the condemned innocent.

It is by
understanding these two poles, that the excessive polarization of contemporary
society can appear to us explicitly as Anti-Christ, for it is through the
dividing of what is united without confusion, the radicalization of the Right
and the Left hand which reduces them to their pathological states. As Christians we must strive to keep our
hearts, to hold on to the center, so that we may continually see in these two
icons – Christ Pantocrator and the Cross – how Christ’s outstretched hands
reach from the highest Heaven to the depths of Hell.

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